A Step Farther Out (43 page)

Plants typically store up about 1% of the sunlight energy that falls on them. A billion or so dollars doled out over the next few years could, in the judgment of people who have some right to an opinion, at least double that. I have insufficient data on which to judge, but I do point out that the risk is low—not very much money involved, compared to the welfare budget, and if done skillfully, for a few dollars more an agricultural research program could be a part of a jobs program. And the payoff is very high. I quote Jonathan Swift: "Whoever could make two ears of corn, or two blades of grass, to grow where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind than the whole race of politicians."

Some forms of Earth-based solar research get a good bit of money; but the technological risks are quite high, except in the small backyard "appropriate technology" applications. I have nothing against those—I shall probably install a form of solar heating system for my hot-water and office heaters—but they will not save us, and they are rather expensive. As a form of conservation they are excellent, but conservation is not the answer.

Still, Earth-based solar is one program with a long-term payoff that is treated about as it deserves to be. We shall see whether, when the payoff finally comes near, the "ecologists" and "concerned scientists" will not try to halt actual installations: after all, the solar constant is 1 kilowatt per square meter, and to get 1000 megawatts one must cover
at least
a million square meters; probably a lot more, and this will go into the "fragile ecology" of the desert.

If the desert is too valuable to take up a few thousand square meters as nuclear waste storage, I wonder why it can be covered with little blue cells; but perhaps.

Finally, there is space-based solar power, a concept whose time seems to have come—except that it receives no mention in the President's declaration of the moral equivalent of war, nor has NASA got what anyone would consider adequate funding. I have discussed SPS systems in other chapters. For my energy program I would give NASA an additional $2 billion for booster development, thus insuring access to space; and fund at a few tens of millions feasibility studies of power satellite systems. Incidentally, the United States gives the World Bank $2 billion a year, of which $225 million goes directly for the salaries of McNamara and 374 other top executives; and if
that
$225 million is well spent, surely some development of Solar Power Satellites would be even more worthwhile?

I haven't even mentioned other schemes, such as the Ocean Thermal System I've described before. I haven't budgeted for garbage and trash (their potential is not great, about 5% at best, but then no one seriously believes windmills can contribute much more than 5% of the energy requirement, and windmills are getting a lot of money). I haven't got far out and talked of mining the Moon, or building big space colonies.

I haven't spoken of airboats—you know, big plastic structures with sides about 500 meters high; you pump out the air and they will literally float on air; get them up in the jet stream and mount windmills on them, and send power down the tether cable.
That is
far out; although not impossible, and surely better than poverty or war?

But, curiously, nothing of this emerges from the President's battle plan. Despite the rhetoric about the obscene profits of the big oil companies, the President's moral equivalent of war has the effect of giving the big internationals a monopoly on our most vital need.

So on whom have we declared war?

"We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of Earth." Lincoln was talking about an entirely different conflict when he said that; but it is a statement that applies to this generation in a way that was never true of Lincoln's. No one today seriously believes that human chattel slavery would have survived into the present era no matter what the Union did in 1860; but I do seriously believe that a generation a hundred years from now might curse our memory.

With increasing frequency I am asked to lecture at various colleges and universities. My message is generally the same: that we don't have to die. Western Civilization need not be finished. This generation can, if it will, make advances at least as significant as the control of fire, the discovery of the wheel, yea, the invention of agriculture. We have only to make the decision, and a few sacrifices. The technology exists.

When I am done I find a curious and almost universal response. First, the audience is somewhat overwhelmed, which doesn't surprise me because I have developed a lot of data and, bluntly, I'm pretty good at presenting it. Next, I find the message welcome, and few in the audience want to argue. Again not surprising: why would anyone, particularly the young, want to believe anything else? But third, what was once a surprise but happens so frequently it no longer is: "Where have you been? Why has no one told us this? All we hear is that Earth is polluted, technology can't save us and is evil to boot, we're running out of resources, there's Only One Earth. . ."

Nor does that response come only from students. At a major southwestern research institution I got the same response when I spoke to the technical staff Presumably each of the engineers had opinions not too different from mine: but the prevailing climate of opinion led each to believe the others thought we were doomed. At the university's the students find the faculty members, if they comment on the future at all, crying doom.

So I shuttle back and forth across the country, to this institution and that, trying desperately to convince America's youth that they have a future. But do they?

Because of course I cannot tell what the future
will be.
I know what it
can
be: a world of plenty, a world of "Survival with Style"; a world in which the United States is wealthy but is not merely an island of wealth in a vast sea of misery; a world in which everyone has more than enough to eat, and, if they want it, a standard of living at least as good as that we enjoyed in the 50's; but that's only what
can
be.

It need not be that way at all. Our grandchildren may curse our memories. There are times when I am convinced that my world can never be.

But what could happen to us? We have the technology. There is no "energy crisis" in any meaningful sense—that is, we know how to produce the energy we need to sustain our high-technology society until such time as we can develop eternal sources.

We know how to get to space, and we could, if we had to, begin right
now
the development of capabilities for mining the Moon and the asteroid belt. The world already grows more than enough food to support its population (although the distribution system is terrible and insects, rodents, bacilli, fungi, and other pests eat more of our crops than ever we do, particularly in the developing nations). We
can
survive, and with style; why might we not?

To begin with, there are the final two horsemen. War is hardly impossible. True, there are signs that many rational planners in the Soviet Union realize that their own development—yea, and survival—depends on
not
conquering the West; that the West is more valuable as a trading partner than ever it would be as part of an empire managed as badly as the Soviet Union now is. True, but not decisive. There are dinosaurs in the Soviet Union, real communists whose moral position is intolerable if ever they abandon chiliastic Marxism. For an analogy: could an Inquisition priest ever have admitted even the possibility that his religion was not true? Could he have lived with himself if ever he did?

And the Soviet Union continues to build weapons long after any discoverable need. Recall the theory? US weapons development stimulated the Soviets; once we called a halt, and they achieved parity, they would see the wastefulness of it all—after all, weapons cost them far more than us (in terms of respective Gross National Products), and they need the resources for development far more than we do—and they would cease the arms race.

So we stopped, and they achieved parity, and they achieved superiority, and they seem headed for supremacy, and they halt not, neither do they slow; indeed, their rate of arms procurement tends rather to increase. No, war is no impossibility.

Then there are the fears of cogent men like Robert Vacca, whose book THE COMING DARK AGE cannot be ignored.

Vacca points out the increasing complexity of our civilization, its increasing dependence on centralized planning and control, the interdependence of all parts on each other, the far-reaching consequences of seemingly trivial errors—recall the power failure in the Northeast caused by one generator going and kicking out all the others? If the margins get thin enough, and Vacca believes they will, collapse of our civilization could be much quicker, and much more thorough, than might be supposed.

After all, no country is more than three meals from bread riots; and rioters have been known to act as if they believed the best way to feed themselves is to burn the bakeries. Urban firestorms are hardly impossible, and the water supply and fire fighting systems are vulnerable. You might or might not be surprised to know just how easily such systems could be knocked out, by accident or by design.

Imagine the colossal traffic jams if the traffic signals ceased working. Couple that with snowfall and ice. Barges frozen in mid-stream, unable to supply coal-powered electric plants; coal yards frozen solid; insufficient electricity to operate the pipelines, thus cutting off oil and gas; railroads not working; people freezing in the dark; trucks not working (it takes electricity to get the gasoline out of our environmentally-protected tanks in filling stations); goods not moving—but you need not imagine it, because it happened to some of you, briefly, and on a smaller scale. Fortunately the nuclear power plants continued to operate, and the Great Freeze of '76 was essentially local; but it takes no great imagination to envision a much wider-spread catastrophe, and to couple it with deliberate action by, say, the authors of THE ANARCHISTS' COOKBOOK, to see how easily the nation could be crippled.

Temporarily: for now. We have vast resources, surpluses, and a residuum of collective loyalty and humanitarianism. Neither of these conditions need prevail. Taxes can end both, and there are signs they are working to that goal as I write this.

But I don't imagine "the collapse," the "knockout blow" that Vacca foresees, as happening this year or next. So far we have a great deal of survival-surplus in our system, and it would take no miracles to insure against the knockout; but the trend is in the other direction.

Consider. One of the most influential books of the past few years is E. F. Schumacher's SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: ECONOMICS AS IF PEOPLE MATTERED. The "appropriate technology" movement has gained many adherents. After all, as Joe Coates (Office of Technology Assessment) said, "Who can be in favor of inappropriate technology?"

At the Denver meeting of the AAAS in 1977 the appropriate technology movement had a seminar and an exhibit. I attended both in the hopes of learning something useful. Instead I saw an interminable series of slides showing true ugliness as if it were beautiful. Photos of privies dominated: not only those $3000 Swedish gizmos that more or less automatically compost the stuff right in your own home, but also old-fashioned ODT's of the kind my wife and I experienced in our childhood; the kind with the crescent cut in the door and a Sears catalogue handy in case you run out of corncobs. "You only have to fork the stuff over about every two weeks," we were told. "Of course you can run into problems with city departments of health."

To which my reaction was that I sincerely hoped if any of
my
neighbors install a privy the Department of Health will give them not merely problems, but citations.

There was more. Bathtubs made of wine vats. A speaker who told how Appropriate Technology changes your head: when the wind comes up at 2 AM and the batteries are all charged up, and you've got work to do, why, you get up and do it. Don't waste that wind energy, because the windmill can't power things to your convenience: it is you who must adapt.

And make no mistake: appropriate technology is not merely for the developing nations alone (if at all); it's for
us.
So just what is it? According to the fact sheet prepared by the National Center for Appropriate Technology, the characteristics are "(1) small scale, (2) decentralized, (3) simple to understand and operate, (4) ecologically sound, and (5) labor intensive."

So. Leave out the first four points, and come to the last: labor intensive. That is not a mere necessary evil. It is the heart of the AP movement. Given the choice they'll take hard labor over machinery every time. I call to evidence their exhibit: a bicycle seat with pedals attached to a chain that ran a wheat grinder. You are to sit and knead bread with the hands while pumping away on the bicycle to grind the wheat with your own muscle power. There was also a film strip showing how the bicycle seat system could be attached to plows (dragging the plow through the dirt) or water pumps, etc., etc.

Now as an advance over the mortar and pestle, a leg-powered crank system is great; but blind donkeys walking in circles to turn the upper on the nether millstone would be a lot less dull. In fact, on seeing that particular vision of the future—and make no mistake about it, those people mean that to
be
the future—Larry Niven had a suggestion. I should, he said, put on jackboots and revolver, and carry a whip; and we would find a gentleman of the black persuasion and dress him in rags and have him sit on the bicycle seat to grind our bread. It should, Larry mused, make a good photograph. A picture of the future.

I can't quarrel, except for details. The person seated on the bicycle seat might not be black, and might not be made; the person with whip might not be white or male; but if grinding one's corn to make one's bread requires that kind of labor, then slavery is not far away. In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread; and mankind has been trying to get someone else to do the sweating ever since, and rather successfully at that. As a lark, as something chic, as a diversion for the middle-class student spending a summer in an appropriate technology commune, labor-intensive systems are all very well; but as a necessity it gets
regular;
it is not amusing as a way of life.